Police can obtain huge quantities of social network data but must sort out the junk to glean useful information.

luiy's insight:

Within hours after the Boston marathon bombing suspects were identified, police probably obtained warrants to search extensive digital records from mobile phone networks and social media and e-mail providers.

The fast-growing rise of such data sets—and rise of network analysis tools to make sense of them—could be a boon in the investigation. It might reveal the existence of other evidence, further plots, or the identity of accomplices. But sorting the real information from the junk will be a challenge.

“The general number of law enforcement requests of e-mail and social network data has gone up by a wide margin,” says Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. The result is that police agencies hold huge databases of stored information.

In the case of Google, such requests are rising rapidly. In the last six months of 2012, for example, Google reported receiving about 8,400 requests for user data, up from about 6,300 in the last six months of 2011. The company reports these data here.

Beginning with the origins, Oycib means in Mayan language "the place of honey". In this projet, Oycib is an e-Research infrastructure for the Collective Intelligence Analysis.

With Oycib infrastructure we propose an analysis model, based in the digital practices and collaboration profiles for the development of Social Learning and the Context Awareness in the Collective Intelligence process.

The infrastructure design and the profiles proposed here, are based on historical studies about social organization glyphs in Mayan culture made by Montgomery (2002) and Calvin (2012).

Initially we worked with four collaboration profiles: the "Itzaat", the "Pitziil", the "Ayuxul" and the "Sajal" (profiles), but we can find others depending of the organization context. Thus, it's important to mention that each profile is found based on the e-Xploración model and they are the qualitative and quantitative interpretation of the collaborative practices. In this way, we propose methods based on Social Network Analysis for the learning and knowledge management.

Thus, the network in Oycib is called "Kaan" (sky or network in Mayan Lenguage). In the "Kaan" we present the visualization of the subjects and objects, such as persons, forums, blogs, files, groups and all the interactions among them. Additionally, each profile and their interactions is presented.

This is a network map of over 2700 robotics companies founded since 2000.

This post is based on a talk Will Weisman, Executive Director of Summits at Singularity University, gave at the SU Global Summit where he used Quid to visualize the evolution of the robotics startup landscape during his introduction to exponential technologies.

The protection of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of UNESCO is ensured by a complex network of actors: institutions, associations, groups and individuals. The goal of this project is to understand which are the main actors in France and monitor over time the interactions between them. Web mapping has been identified as the most suitable methodology for this analysis. This method relies on the underlying idea that hyperlinks between web sites can be used as representations of social connections.

For hundreds of years, the huge, secretive collection of manuscripts remained mostly unseen by all but the most rarified of collectors. After Leonardo's death in France, writes the British Library, his student Francesco Melzi “brought many of his manuscripts and drawings back to Italy. Melzi’s heirs, who had no idea of the importance of the manuscripts, gradually disposed of them.” Nonetheless, over 5,000 pages of notes “still exist in Leonardo’s ‘mirror writing’, from right to left.” In the notebooks, da Vinci drew “visions of the aeroplane, the helicopter, the parachute, the submarine and the car. It was more than 300 years before many of his ideas were improved upon.”

The process of creating a data visualisation can be messy: Finding data sources, sketching out a chart form, figuring out how to download data, analysing the data, trying out a chart type, bringing the data in a different format to try another chart type, researching more data, finding that the data doesn’t fit to my article, deciding against the chart altogether – it’s all very much entangled.

Collecting and visualizing Facebook networks using people's profile photos as node images (three ways: with Gephi, igraph, or qgraph). Includes the steps to generate the visualization along with an R script.

On this site the University of Chicago Press is pleased to present the first three volumes of the History of Cartography in PDF format. Navigate to the PDFs from the left column. Each chapter of each book is a single PDF. The search box on the left allows searching across the content of all the PDFs that make up the first six books.

CONNECTED: THE POWER OF SIX DEGREES (alternate title: How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer) is a 2008 documentary film by Annamaria Talas. It was first aired in 2009 on the Science Channel. The documentary introduces the audience to the main ideas of network science through the exploration of the concept of six degrees of separation. Stars: Nyaloka Auma, Kevin Bacon, Albert-László Barabás

This tutorial is meant to help beginners learn tree based modeling from scratch. After the successful completion of this tutorial, one is expected to become proficient at using tree based algorithms and build predictive models.

WHAT ARE GEOGRAPHICAL TAUTOLOGIES? When a place name is redundant. For example, in Spanish, Los Angeles means “The Angels”, so the baseball team The Los Angeles Angels actually means “The The Angels Angels”. The Gobi means desert in English. Therefore Gobi Desert translates to “Desert Desert” The infographic below shows the same thing, but with geographical locations instead of sports teams compared.

HOW DO THESE TAUTOLOGIES COME ABOUT? History and different languages. The main geographic tautologies in English occurred when European colonizers or explorers combined a geographical term with a local word for the area. Often these would coincide, as they were being named after the same geographical feature, and that causes redundancy.

WHAT’S IN THIS INFOGRAPHIC? With the exception of Pendleton Hill, Connecticut (which was too interesting to resist), included are only the major areas most people have heard of. Orange designates deserts, green denotes land, and blue is for water.

Think of LUNA as not just page after page of thumbnails, but as a dynamic space for working with digital content. Simple Keyword searching is a common way to search for content. Advanced Search can help you find specific items within certain parameters.

But what if you don't know what to search for? How can you enter a keyword if you don't have one? Try LUNA's browse facet categories feature.

Browsing facets presents all the data of a collection in 4 categories: Who, What, When, and Where. Facets are also presented so you'll immediately know what kind of content is in a collection.

Users can view individual images in the Detail View or multiple images in the LUNA Workspace. And of course there's still the ability to browse through pages of thumbnails but now you can customize your view selecting the number of thumbnails per page and their size. You can also choose to go full screen and eliminate your browser's navigation tools. Just use the forward and back feature on virtually every page of LUNA:

This interactive geoengineering map, prepared by ETC Group and the Heinrich Boell Foundation, is an attempt to shed light on the worldwide state of geoengineering by showing the scope of research and experimentation. There is no complete record of weather and climate control projects so this map is necessarily partial. It builds on an earlier map of Earth Systems Experimentation published in 2012. That original map documented almost 300 projects and experiments related to the field of geoengineering. Five years later over 800 such projects can be identified. These include projects in Carbon Capture, Solar Radiation Management, Weather Modification and other approaches.

For more information and background on geoengineering and its ecological, economic, social and justice implications see geoengineeringmonitor.org

The film follows the story of programming prodigy and information activist Aaron Swartz. From Swartz's help in the development of the basic internet protocol RSS to his co-founding of Reddit, his fingerprints are all over the internet. But it was Swartz's groundbreaking work in social justice and political organizing combined with his aggressive approach to information access that ensnared him in a two-year legal nightmare. It was a battle that ended with the taking of his own life at the age of 26. Aaron's story touched a nerve with people far beyond the online communities in which he was a celebrity. This film is a personal story about what we lose when we are tone deaf about technology and its relationship to our civil liberties.

Networks are everywhere, from the Internet, to social networks, and the genetic networks that determine our biological existence. Illustrated throughout in full colour, this pioneering textbook, spanning a wide range of topics from physics to computer science, engineering, economics and the social sciences, introduces network science to an interdisciplinary audience. From the origins of the six degrees of separation to explaining why networks are robust to random failures, the author explores how viruses like Ebola and H1N1 spread, and why it is that our friends have more friends than we do. Using numerous real-world examples, this innovatively designed text includes clear delineation between undergraduate and graduate level material. The mathematical formulas and derivations are included within Advanced Topics sections, enabling use at a range of levels. Extensive online resources, including films and software for network analysis, make this a multifaceted companion for anyone with an interest in network science.

This post is part of a blog series on historical data vis titled “Data Trails. Snapshots from the history of data visualisation” and originally appeared over at my friends’ from Idalab, a Berlin-based specialist on data science and machine learning.

There is a very basic joy in roaming through atlases and in looking at maps. Atlases are rich collections of places, and if there is one thing they can do it is making you travel around the world, to places near and far. Cartography – an age-old discipline combining science and art – has created a unique way of looking at our planet, of flying over continuous landscapes and endless oceans. The 19th century was a golden age of atlases. Beautiful pieces for the educated household were printed in many different countries. Many of them feature one very special type of map: the comparative tableau showing the longest rivers and highest mountains of the world.

Exploring flows between origins and destinations visually is a common task, but can be difficult to get right. In R, there are many tutorials on the web that show how to produce static flow maps (see here, here, here, and here, among others).

Over the past couple years, R developers have created an infrastructure to bridge R with JavaScript using the htmlwidgets package, allowing for the generation of interactive web visualizations straight from R. I’d like to demonstrate here a few examples for exploratory interactive flow graphics that use this infrastructure.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.